For those of you who work at the intersection of southern history, religion, and music, the H-Southern Music email list just might be for you. I recently posted a question to list members and got some great feedback.I asked about the work I'm doing for a chapter/article on the interconnections of early rock music and revivalistic religion/hot protestantism/pentecostalism . . . etc. (I wrote a little about this in the last chapter of my book The Fire Spreads, but I'll be exploring this in much greater detail now.) I asked list members about sources--primary or secondary . . . interviews, archives, what have you--that they could suggest. Here are a few of the items that I have found useful mixed in with those that I only learned about through the suggestions of list members (in no particular order). Anything else to add?

Jerma Jackson, “Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Evolution of Gospel Music,” Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, eds. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)

6
comments:

Hey Randall, at the conference in Indy just passed I met Douglas Harrison, whose work is great on things related to this subject, see "Why Southern Gospel Matters," Religion and American Culture 18 (2008): 27-58. He also writes about the Gaithers and has other pieces of interest, listed at http://www.fgcu.edu/CAS/911.asp

Randall: Glad you are working on this topic. I review some of this literature in my "Popular Culture" chapter in the Blackwell Companion to American Religion (edited by Philip Goff): http://books.google.com/books?id=ZohdcPSo3LsC&pg=PA254&dq=Schmalzbauer+%22Popular+Culture%22+%22Wally+Fowler%22&hl=en&ei=RnkCTv7UOYGztwf5yOSaDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Schmalzbauer%20%22Popular%20Culture%22%20%22Wally%20Fowler%22&f=false

There's also James Goff's Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel Music--good text for overview of the genre's development from a historical perspective (not so much from a musicological/sonic perspective).

C.R. Wilson had a great piece in Southern Cultures several years ago called something like "Just a Little Talk With Jesus": Elvis Presley, Religious Music, and Southern Spirituality.

Also, Peter Guralnick's bio set on Elvis delves a bit into the whole Pentecostalism thing.

We screened the Larry Norman doc at the Florida State Graduate Religion Symposium two years ago. It's not a bad documentary, but its narrative emphasis shifts relatively early into the business decisions behind the creation and demise of Solid Rock Records, and the legal/economic wrangling that led to Norman's late-life requests for fans' financial support, etc. Which is to say that less time is spent on the emergence of Jesus music in the 70s, etc. Certainly worth watching if you haven't given it a look, though.